· Jim Collins Books (Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice)

· Distant Force (about Henry Singleton)

· Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Essential Tension

Part of the class would require reading some material about extreme stock market conditions like:

· The Big Short

· Too Big to Fail

· This Time is Different

· When Genius Failed

· The Panic of 1907

This part of the class would revolve around contemporary sources. Students would read newspaper articles from the various crashes. They’d also read newspapers around the time of the various market bottoms. Historical case studies should be based on sources that were present and available to investors, CEOs, etc., at the time. So, if you’re studying an investment Ben Graham made in 1942 – you should be using The New York Times archives to find articles printed in 1942 and you should be getting your data from a Moody’s Manual from 1942.

This is critical.

And many people have never done it. Many investors have never gone back through old Moody’s Manuals, newspaper articles, etc. If you think you know enough about 1929 and yet you’ve never read something written in 1929 – you’re idea of knowing is too intellectual and external. Knowing is understanding what the paper looked like every morning to folks who were as blind to the future as you are now. You have to internalize what it feels like to be in the middle of all that.

***

[Assuming that Geoff has done all this (impressive already to me), I wonder how successful he actually is at investing? Here's a hint, he moved to Texas and is now working full-time for gurufocus. (So he still "works" for a living.)